The end of Golf?

Hi everyone, yes i know, a bit of a drastic headline, but read on and all will be revealed.

Golf, well golf clubs to be exact are in a bit of a state at the moment, pick up any trade magazine or have a nosey round some agents websites and you'll see dozens of courses up for sale every week. So why is this? Well there simply isn't enough golfers to go around at the minute. Commercially run clubs are not getting enough green fees in to balance the books and most private clubs are substantially down on memberships. Now admittedly, in my area there is a lot of clubs. One commercial course recently went bust and one is trying to build houses on part of it as it only has a few dozen members. Now this isnt good, but if a commercially operated club goes bust the worst thats going to happen is you loose your dough for the year. Far more worrying is whats happening at private members clubs. 

A few years ago most clubs had a waiting list, and in this area anyway average fees where about £600 per year. 600-700 members and everything was rosey.  

Problems, at best if a 4 ball goes out every 10 minutes from 7am till 3pm thats 192 people and a very, very busy golf course. 400 over the weekend, so when do  the other 300 play? 

My expierence tells me (that in the north west anyway) long gone are the days where people just join a club for the prestige of it. Anyone wanting to pay £600+ to play golf wants to play 2-3 times a week at least. As a result most clubs are now down to 300-400 members. There are still the odd one or 2  prestigious clubs that have full memberships but equally there are a few with only a couple of hundered.

If a club has been 100 members short of its running costs for the last few years it could very easily be in severve financial difficulty, I know of 1 members club that is almost £500k overdrawn. That does show some very bad management from the people involved, but what happens if a private members club goes bust? I'm not an accountant but I would imagine that each of the members would be liable for a portion of the debt (makes loosing £600 seem ok).

Anyway, the moral of my rather long winded tale is before you part with any cash in the future check your clubs accounts or at very least the membership numbers.

Interesting post, will be interesting to see what the state of the golf clubs is like at the end of this year.